2015 Dog Brothers Canadian Gathering of the Pack

As usual, the day is now a swirl of images and impressions and the consciousness of it all stays with me now.

35 fighters: a perfect number to let each fighter rest enough but not too much before getting back in the fray. There were fighters from all three of the Canadian Clans: Tricky Dog's Tricky Bastards, Growling Dog's Toro Clan, and of course Sled Dog's clan-- and two fighters who came all the way from Japan!

One of the many things that captured my attention was the quality of the knife fights. The aluminum blades have really made a difference here over what we did before (plastic, rattan dowels, etc); the fear from the real risk of injury (easy to get a broken hand or maybe even something else) makes for much more realistic behavior.

In this context I would say there was a lot of quality knife work being done. Instead of the all-too-common high adrenaline slashing/snap cut fight that we often see, many fighters were doing excellent work setting up moves that were well targeted.

Also noteworthy was the goodly number of cherries-- so naturally my opening talk included "The Dog Brothers Parable of the Cherry" wink emoticon As Sled Dog Philip Gelinas commented to me, it is good to have continuous infusions of fresh blood.

Strong fighting spirit was shown by everyone; one of the more notable cases being the 59 year old fighter (whose name slips my mind at the moment- sorry) who kept his composure and did well in some real wars.

There were a goodly number of double stick fights-- which is something I really like to see. As usual Brett Simms impressed here. His bilateralism is quite good.

Sunday some twelve people came in for a day-aftere workshop.

Growling Dog Rene Cocolo , Sled Dog, and I each taught a 90 minute session. Naturally Rene went with Krabi Krabong-- I enjoyed watching him teach for the first time; very clear, efficient teaching methodology, and nice movement.

For my session I taught A fairly new block of material: "12 things to do from a roof block". The underlying idea is that the roof block is an extremely important technique of proven high efficacy. The limitation is that 99% of the time people throw a caveman coming off the roof and thus many people go to a roof block off of their caveman. Thus the idea of this block of material: to have other practical options that will allow the person doing them to attack really well.

The final session was Sled Dog. His focus was on PTK's development wrist mobility in combinations instead of just swinging forehands and backhands.